Star Fighter X2 Now in the App Store!

Posted on August 31, 2010 by dan

Star Fighter X2 is here!

It is now filtering into the various app stores around the globe. Currently available in the US store, it should be coming to the Canadian store soon. Will have to check into the European and further East markets shortly.

Check it out in iTunes.

Many thanks to everyone who helped get our game live. Couldn’t have done it without the help of our beta testers, Aaron Hedquist, Patrick Burleson, and Tom Hoag. Very special thanks to Mike Berg from We Heart Games. If you have Mike on your team, you’re definitely in good shape. :) You guys rock!

Already found and working on some bugs noticed after release so I’ll be submitting a new update very soon.

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Star Fighter X2 Release Date

Posted on August 30, 2010 by dan

Approval!

It has been an incredibly busy week so I’m a bit behind in my updates. Star Fighter X2 has been approved and it will be launching on August 31st!

The SFX2 website is now live and includes lots of content from the game. Click here to check it out.

Huge thanks to Mike for helping to get this game and site ready for launch.

Beginnings…

The release of Star Fighter X2 marks our very first game in the App Store.  Exciting times!  Although the excitement isn’t completely due to the idea of, “sweet! let’s see if we can make a few bucks!”, it’s the fact that we’re releasing a product into such a tight-knit community of developers and consumers.  At least for me, that has to be the most exciting / nerve racking aspect of an App Store release.   Aside from your group of beta testers, you get to see what people think about it, how much they hate it or love it, and how we can improve upon the ideas that we have built into v1.0.

The concept behind SFX2 was dreamed up back in April of this year for the 360iDev Game Jam.  For those of you who haven’t heard about 360iDev, listen up!  Aside from WWDC, it’s the absolute best iPhone developer’s conference out there today.  360 Conferences is doing another 360iDev in November down in Austin, TX.  Do yourself a favour and  grab a ticket (or two) right away.  (www.360idev.com)

At each 360iDev, they schedule a night for the Game Jam.  Game Jams are a lot of fun.  The idea is to pump out some form of playable prototype iPhone/iPad game — starting from the end of the day’s sessions — and have it ready by the end of the night.

The last Game Jam was sponsored by TouchArcade, and they graciously provided loads of food and drink, and a special forum thread where we could post progress updates for visitors to their forums.

Since the iPad was JUST released in the US, I knew I had to do an iPad game.  With the larger display, I figured it would be great to also include some form of head-to-head gameplay.  Next, perhaps it would be fun to use the touch interface to drive something around your side of the device, and do something to attack your opponent?  The first prototype, called Shove It, was born!  It was a tank game, each player had their own half of the display to move their tank around and fire upon the other player.

Further into the night the attendees were making great progress.  The atmosphere was awesome.  You constantly heard ideas being bounced around and everyone was really into their work.

That, ladies and gentlemen, was but one example of the community I referred to earlier.  These events are fantastic in promoting collaboration between people from all ranges of skill sets and backgrounds.

I ended up staying the entire night.  Towards the morning, I was trying to get a better firing/aiming algorithm to work but I decided to rip it out at the last minute.  Turns out red bull can only sustain your “mental alertness” for so long.  Shove It was still semi-playable and I felt that it could really become something fun and easy for anyone to pick up and play.  At lunch the next day, everyone presented their games.

Seeing a working prototype led us to believe it could be a fun game.  We decided to stick with the concept, but we changed the theme to a space shooter, and put more elbow grease and polish into it.

Today we announce it’s going to be going up for sale on the App Store.  Unless someone can speak up, this might also be the first game originally developed at the 2010 360iDev Game Jam to be released!  There were a number of games released from the previous 360iDev conference.

In essence, we owe the launch of this game to the opportunities available from great conferences like 360iDev and sponsors such as TouchArcade.  If you are sitting on the fence about going, here’s proof that you never know what new connections and friendships may develop, or new ideas that might develop into the next great app!

If you are reading this and would like to take a test-drive of SFX2 before tomorrow’s launch, either email me or send me a DM on Twitter, (@coffeedan).

Onwards and upwards!

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3D Modeling in Star Fighter X2

Posted on August 18, 2010 by dan

For today’s post I’m going to quickly discuss some of the work that went into the design of the combat drones used in the game.

As is typical in game development, you need a quick way to prototype and determine if a game is actually fun to play.  One of the key elements of the game is the spaceship that you control, so that was the first logical thing to mock up.

I quickly came up with some simple spaceship graphics to see how they would work during game-play.  Here is a sample image for one of the first spaceship designs:


Look at that fine workmanship!  As you can tell, I’m clearly not a designer.  However, it did setup a foundation on where we could take the look of the ships.

Our fearless designer, Mike Berg, took a look and said, “yeah, let me um… fix that up for you”, and he started working his magic.  I’d like to present to you a teaser video of the process involved in making the ships for Star Fighter X2.

This is a stop motion video consisting of screen captures taken every 10 seconds over a few hours.  It’s awesome to see the progression.

After the model was complete Mike rendered the ship and pumped out some 2D images from the perspective of looking at the ship from above.  We think the pre-rendered ships in the game look great and here’s a quick sample of how they’d (almost) look…

Combat Drones

The final product after hours of modeling.

Mike has written up a post on the process and methods he used to create this work in his next blog post for #iDevBlogADay.  Check it out here!

Thanks for reading!

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Grand Opening & Star Fighter X2

Posted on August 17, 2010 by dan

Welcome to the new Manic Gaming website!  Over the past few months we have been very busy getting our first game completed, Star Fighter X2.

Star Fighter X2 is a fun and easy-to-play game for the iPad — yes, we’re only releasing on the iPad, more on that in a future post — with an arcade feel that brings the concepts of the classic Asteroids with the head-to-head style of Pong.  I’ll be writing more about its development process, show some teaser graphics and videos from the game, and some of the roadmap for the game in future posts.

Along with the game we’ve been busy working on a new website that focused on a better way to communicate to our customers and fellow developers.  This new site was designed and developed by Mike Berg from We Heart Games.  His work is second to none and we couldn’t be happier.  His rates are also incredibly reasonable.

Be sure to check out our FormSpring profile, for whatever you might want to know about us!  We have a contact email form available from our Contact page, or you can simply email us at support@manicgaming.com.

We are also on Twitter @manicgaming.  Follow us for the latest news and release details, and you can hit me up, personally, @coffeedan.

You can also become our friend on Facebook here, and become a fan of the new Star Fighter X2 page.

So what about the game, you might ask?  Yup, we’ll get to that in the next post.  Go grab that morning coffee (or afternoon tea if you’re across the Pond) and come back soon!

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